“Open your eyes,” he repeats, “and look at what you’ve done.”

His hand is still locked around my arm. It pulls me off-balance, drags me to my knees. I slip on the wet asphalt and catch myself on something that gives with a sick, wet crunch beneath my hand. I freeze.

The body. We’re kneeling in front of the body. Elliott wants me to open my eyes and look at—

What I’ve done.

And suddenly, I know whose body is beneath my hand. I don’t want to look at it, but I can’t keep my eyes closed now either, so I open them and look at Elliott instead.

He’s crying. No. That’s not the right word. No word is quite right, not for this.

Except maybe broken. Maybe anguish. Maybe hate.

I tear my gaze from his. But I still can’t look at the body, so I look at the massive tree behind it. This one was felled a long time ago: bare limbs, a few clumps of shriveled brown leaves, twisted roots that have long since been washed clean. Its trunk is scored with gouges. I don’t want to think about what put them there, what felled this tree, what killed the person lying in front of me.

I can’t delay any longer. I lower my eyes to the body.

Rotted skin, white bone. It’s gouged too. If the storm wasn’t so violent, if the air wasn’t filled with wind and rain and ozone, the smell would be terrible.

I raise my eyes a little higher. The single remaining headlight casts sharp shadows over the body, but I can still make out clumps of hair on the corpse’s scalp. He was a blond. Just like Elliott. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt, the same one he was wearing when he walked across Valkyrie Bridge last autumn. His glasses—the glasses I sold him—are crooked, and one lens is broken.

Braedan Ackermann. The first son the mayor exiled.

“We can’t stay here. We’ve got to move,” I say, but I don’t stand up. I can’t look away from the body.

He was my enemy, I tell myself. Just like Ginger. Just like Elliott. It doesn’t matter that his body is in front of me now—I’ve known for a long time that he was dead and that it was because of the things I’d sold him, and I didn’t care.

But I do now. Because he wasn’t ever actually my enemy, was he? He wasn’t the shadowseeker, wasn’t even some random cop. He was just a guy. The same age as my own brother. The brother that I want back so badly, the brother I’ve been determined to do anything to find.

And now the cost of my determination is rotting beneath my hands.